Two Minute Date with Jason Schwartzman

The weirdly normal Jason Schwartzman.

It's been more than a decade since Jason Schwartzman tickled us senseless with his oddball shtick in Rushmore, in which he played a lovesick, revenge-driven dweeb. Since then, he's become Hollywood's go-to for Bellevue levels of kookiness: collecting hairs in Slackers; romping through India barefoot in The Darjeeling Limited. True to form, in his new HBO series, Bored to Death, debuting this month, Schwartzman plays a white-wine-swilling, colonic-loving scribe who moonlights as a private eye. "I never approach something with the idea that I am doing a weird person," Schwartzman, 29, insists.

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In fact, Schwartzman, an L.A. native, swears that he's a wash-and-go guy who enlists a pal if his trademark nose-sweeping locks need a trim. "My mom had a whack at it once. She had a Flowbee—two Flowbees, actually. Flowbae, if you will," he kids. Mom, in this case, is Talia Shire, Francis Ford Coppola's sister (forevermore Connie Corleone from The Godfather, to us).

Pedigree aside, Schwartzman has carved out a niche all his own as a hipster impresario: Besties with director Wes Anderson and engaged to fashion designer Brady Cunningham, he also played drums for Phantom Planet before going solo with the sweet pop of his latest band, Coconut Records. "I have my own label, which sounds fancier than it is," he shrugs. Slightly less hip, while shooting Bored in Brooklyn, he nursed a guy crush on costar Zach Galifianakis. "I went to the store and bought beer, a big bar of dark chocolate, and a bag of dried mangos, then YouTubed him for hours," Schwartzman confesses. "I had a three-hour date with him, essentially." We've done worse on a Saturday night, thinking about Schwartzman.